Ernest Haycox Jr.

Oregon Voices

Tall Tales, True Tales

Ernest Haycox and Researching the Old West

Over a career spanning twenty-eight years, Ernest Haycox wrote twenty-four novels and nearly three hundred short stories. He was frequently seen in leading national weeklies Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post and probably was the former's most prolific nonstaff contributor. A dozen of his works became motion pictures — including Stagecoach, the John Ford–John Wayne classic — and many more were televised in the 1950s and 1960s. Although he published far fewer books and stories than contemporaries Zane Grey and Max Brand did, Haycox was a more careful composer than they, and critics gave him high marks for his descriptive powers and his skill in character development. He influenced many of his peers, and a 1996 literary appraisal speculated that his sway over readers may help explain the pronounced western migration in the United States that followed World War II. ¹ If true, says his son, Ernest Haycox Jr., that news would have saddened a father who, though no foe of progress, thought the Pacific Northwest's relative lack of crowding and clutter was a precious asset.

Ernest Haycox considered writing susceptible to good business practice. He worked in a downtown office in Portland, keeping regular hours and reserving time for research and background reading as well as composition. A short story might be based on a paragraph or two of notes — an idea and perhaps the names of a few characters — but the later novels were outlined in detail and accompanied by elaborate analyses of the principal players. Haycox sought to eliminate distractions, although he was not particularly successful at doing so, being involved in Republican party affairs, numerous community projects, and the activities of his alma mater, the University of Oregon. At the time of his death in October 1950, he was a trustee of the Multnomah Athletic Club, a director of the Oregon Historical Society (where he was put to work writing informational highway signs), and the immediate past president of Portland Rotary and the Oregon Dad's Club. During his lifetime, Haycox assembled an impressive collection of western and early American literature that served as a research library and required (when he built the house of his dreams in Portland's West Hills) a separate, two-story study. Its contents and the writer's manuscripts are now a memorial collection at the University of Oregon library.

Ernest Haycox at Minam Meadows in the Wallowa Mountains, 1946. The photographer was journalist and later U.S. Senator Richard Neuberger, who was in the area with a group that also included Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

Self portrait, circa 1944.

"His writing methods are wholly orthodox and businesslike, and as far removed from the ivory tower and "candle light and soft music" concepts as he can contrive to make them. He works in a downtown office with hours from eight to five. During these hours he has but one constant preoccupation. This is 'to picture the West as it was, with as great an accuracy as possible, and to put into my characters those hopes and despairs which all people feel, and those moments of greatness and evil which all people possess.'"

— From "About the Author" in Trail Town, Armed Services ed., No. P-16, undated

In the following essay, Haycox's biographer and son describes how the writer, though claiming to dislike realism as a literary form, was nonetheless attracted to historic themes and acquired a scholar's grasp of frontier life and times. The larger story of the Oregon author's busy and accomplished life can be found in On a Silver Desert: The Life and Ernest Haycox, by Ernest Haycox Jr., published by the University of Oklahoma Press in fall 2003. The press also recently reissued the writer's well-regarded 1943 novel, Bugles in the Afternoon, a traditional Haycox mix of adventure fiction in a factual, accurately detailed setting — in this case frontier cavalry life in the 1870s and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Tall Tales, True Tales

The young man needed a roof over his head; and because he was an artist with modest resources, this suggested Greenwich Village. There he rented a miserable, walk-up chamber for twenty-five dollars a month. He next arranged storage for a large trunk that contained his worldly possessions, and he made a down payment on a typewriter on which to produce his epics. A bit later, he would lay out fifty dollars for a suit and a hat. This last investment was a decided gamble. He wanted to look successful when calling on editorial offices, but the four hundred dollars he had saved to finance this expedition was fading fast. ² Stretching it involved skipping meals, a tactic of limited efficacy over any period of time.

In an undated promotional photograph, Ernest Haycox appears to be buying a newspaper or magazine subscription at his Sandy Boulevard office. Once a newsboy and youthful merchandizer himself (he hawked candy and ice cream on a California train at age fifteen), Haycox was an easy mark for such solicitations.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

This was spring 1924 and Ernest Haycox, age twenty-four, had come to New York City to establish himself as a writer of adventure fiction. He faced long odds, to be sure, but not as long as most who, seeking literary fame and fortune, have undertaken this pilgrimage to the center of the publishing universe. He had already sold a few sea stories to pulp magazines, the first such transaction occurring in 1922 while he was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon in Eugene. So he knew a few names and could at least get through the doors at Street & Smith and Doubleday, Page.

The writer and his children, Ernest Jr. and Mary Ann, snooze on the sand at Cannon Beach, where the family vacationed steadily in the 1930s. There was not a better meal than that composed of clams recovered at low morning tide, he said, followed by a mounded pie of huckleberries harvested on Tillamook Head.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

He also had that attribute which, he said, separated those thousands who wanted to write from that handful who actually did write. He had learned persistence — the ability to stay at a typewriter for hours on end and to stand by the finished product. He was possibly exaggerating for dramatic purpose when he said that his first sale was a story that fifteen publications had rejected. At the same time, the number of rejection slips he did receive in college was sufficient to decorate three walls of the shed in which he composed his first works.

Haycox remained in New York for about two years, returning to Portland in the fall of 1926 with generally unpleasant opinions of the big city. He had found New Yorkers to be a mostly noisy, unmannerly crowd. The food — at least the food he could afford — was terrible. There was no breathing space in the city, no solace for the outsider. "I lived on $9 a week," he remembered later. "I had not yet learned my profession, I sold at very irregular intervals; and on top of that I fell sick. I had to keep writing, but it was poor stuff, and I fell farther behind; and I used to lie in bed at night and say to myself, 'I'll be broke thirty days from now, and here I am, a stranger living in the middle of ten million people, and what do I do next?' " ³

His search for the history of early Oregon sometimes took him to civilization's common records-storage room, the trash dump.

"I've been out of the office for a few days, some of that time spent crawling through the brush along the streams and rivers of the Willamette Valley — accompanied by a former governor of Oregon — tracking down the precise location of first donation land claims, first cabins, first mills, first trails and roads. Now and then we'd come a modern version of a kitchen midden — abandoned bedsprings, modern coffee cans, candy-bar wrappers, beer bottles, war-time girdles which had lost their stretch, etc. Beneath one such junk pile lies the foundations of a grist mill built by a French-Canadian ex-voyageur more than 100 years ago; beneath another is a water wheel, waiting some collector's digging. A hundred years is not a long time to the east. Out here a century covers the complete evolution of a state from the bow and arrow warfare to that final attribute of civilization, the pinball machine."

—Letter to Ted Shane, Collier's magazine columnist, July 11, 1947

That described the first months, when the issue remained in doubt. But at a slightly later time, when thing were going better and his mood had lightened, he continued to question the necessity of his presence in the city. "I do not deny it is profitable and pleasant to meet your editors," he wrote to a friend, but "insofar as writing is concerned ... actual contact hasn't any more virtue than the United States mail."⁴

On the evidence, however, his time in New York was more usefully invested than he would ever realize. After settling in, he began to walk, for purposes of exercise and undisturbed contemplation, the combination of which frequently produced ideas for stories. The best walking was in the city's several great parks, where he could not help but notice countless tributes and dedications to events of the American Revolution. He was writing stories with a western flavor for the most part; but there he was, in the middle of an earlier and equally noble and desperate period of conflict. In places such as Prospect Park in Brooklyn, he could imagine where the lines had formed, could almost hear the commands and the spattering musket fire.

Of course, you could not learn much from a plaque. Those did not describe the colors of uniforms or the manner of the men in them or give one any sense of the noise and confusion of the conflict — things a writer needed to know. He began spending time in libraries, reading about revolutionary times and personalities and devouring descriptions of individual encounters. He made notes and drew maps and, after he bought a car, spent weekends inspecting battlefield sites outside the city. He began to write "easterns," if you will, as well as westerns.

He also frequented bookstores during his days in New York, particularly those in which old volumes of frontier and early American history might be found. He was not much of a customer at first — could not afford to be — but he knew good raw material when he saw it. On December 1, 1924, temporarily flush — $460 in hand, another $440 due — he made his first major purchase, a $40 commitment to H.M. Chittenden's notable history, The American Fur Trade in the Far West.⁵ He read it carefully, and Roll Along, Missouri! a rousing novella of Missouri River and Rocky Mountain times, followed shortly. Various places and people described by Chittenden briefly appeared in the tale, among them the peerless mountain man and guide (and backslapper, we learn) Jim Bridger.

Ernest Haycox, A Life

Born in Portland on October 1, 1899, Ernest Haycox spent his early years in almost constant motion, his footloose and temperamental father not being one to greatly value employment tenure. William James Haycox was a deckhand and fireman aboard the T. J. Potter and other riverboats before he married Bertha Burghardt in 1898. After Erny's birth, the young family wandered the Pacific Northwest, WJ holding jobs — never for long — in logging camps and lumber mills and as a sheepherder, miner, shingle-maker, and farm hand.
    When Bertha and WJ separated in about 1909, their son became the transient responsibility of various relatives. He lived one year at Seaside, Oregon, where dour grandfather Tom Haycox, born in England, was a commercial painter and city councilman. He graduated from Parkplace Grade School near Oregon City, the ninth he had attended, living there with the family of Bertha's sister Emma (Himler). She encouraged his reading and took him to grandfather Ernest Burghardt's farm and gristmill at Deep Creek, fifteen-odd miles east on the Clackamas River. He loved the place and dreamed of being a busy, diversified agriculturist like Ernest, who was a cheerful, storytelling German immigrant via Wisconsin.
    The young man was self-supporting at times, washing dishes in restaurants and selling newspapers (Portland's Lonsdale Square was a favored stand) and, during his Lincoln High School years (1913–1917), bellhopping at the Norton, a residential hotel. In 1915, he summered alone in San Francisco, working as vendor on a passenger train. Set on further adventure, the fifteen-year-old also lied his way into the Oregon National Guard. That put him on the Mexican border in the summer of 1916, when the U.S. Army went in pursuit of the evanescent Pancho Villa. It was exciting stuff, and, back at Lincoln, he began contributing articles about soldiering and border romance to the Cardinal, the school's literary monthly.
    Mobilized again, Haycox spent the summer of 1917 guarding bridges and chasing Wobblies (members of the striking International Workers of the World) in eastern Washington, then a year in France as a military policeman and rifle instructor. Back home, he attended Reed College for one year and the University of Oregon, where creative writing studies were offered, for three. At Eugene, he was a steady composer of short fiction and, while rejection slips mounted, he eventually sold a series of stories about fish piracy, drawn from what he had seen and heard on a summer job in Alaska.
    After graduation in 1923, followed by a half year as a police reporter, Haycox went to New York, reasoning that he would benefit from proximity to the publishing market. There was a cute redhead on the eastbound train, an art student named Jill Chord from Baker City. They were married at The Little Church Around the Corner in 1925 and returned to Portland in 1926. A daughter was born in 1928 and a son in 1931, about the time Erny stopped writing at home — a modest house near the Rose City Golf Course — and rented an office at 42nd and Sandy Boulevard. He would move to a downtown building when the Georgian colonial house he and Jill built in Portland's West Hills was completed in 1940.
    Haycox wrote westerns for the pulp market until 1931, then principally for Collier's magazine until, in 1943, the Saturday Evening Post broke its competitor's exclusive hold. Twenty-one of his twenty-four hardcover novels first appeared as serials and all but one — plus most of the short stories and novellas — have been republished half a dozen times or more.
    His later work focused on pioneer Oregon, and it perplexed him that book reviewers could praise a story about a fellow in the freight business (Canyon Passage) or a steamboat captain (Long Storm) but still pass it off as a "western," which admittedly carries a bit of baggage. Other writers, including Louis L'Amour, have similarly sputtered that a rousing yarn about old times in New York or Kentucky might be called — and properly — a historic novel. But west of the wide Mississippi, no such luck.

Writer Haycox claimed to be a romantic, little interested in realism. The latter was a form of literature that in its modern iterations, he once opined, could be a deadly recitation of unimportant, unexciting details. Maybe so, but in New York City he began to learn how to look for the truth and how to incorporate it in a fictional framework; and his reputation rests mightily on the honesty and accuracy with which he portrayed the great frontier. In helping shape his philosophy as a writer as well as his method of work at the beginning of the journey, the big city had been remarkably helpful.

Where do writers come from? What compels them? Good questions.

"As Mr. [Brooks] Atkinson suggests, there is no formal training period for a writer, no undergraduate schools and no tradition of the pupil sitting at the feet of the old hand. Neither is there a conscious selection of practitioners on an informational or ethical basis, as in law or medicine. Sherwood Anderson once observed that we are fugitives, and frequently failures, recruited from everywhere. We are ex-bartenders, ex-bankers, broken-down teachers and philanthropists, housewives, strip-teasers. We are the frustrated, the hopeful, the educated or the illiterate; we come humbly or we come with all the arrogance of a green deputy sheriff. Some of us took to writing because it seemed an easy way to make a living; some of us originally thought it was a glamorous profession. We have perhaps but one common thing: The logorrhea latent in the human race is with us an irrepressible running-off."

—Letter to the editor of the New York Timesbook review section, September 20, 1946

In late 1932, Haycox received a friendly but chiding letter from his college writing instructor, W.F.G. Thatcher, to which he replied in part:

I know that for a man to go along on an even and safe schedule year after year is nothing less than admission that he is a hack ... [and] I am not afraid of some parts of my equipment and ability. But I do not know whether I can carry a big piece of work through. I shall, of course, try it one of these days. At the present moment the financial angle is most important. It makes me less of a writer, but I can't overlook the obligation I have. I can't overlook the matter of security for the family.⁶

He had little need to apologize. Back in Portland, he had in a very short time become a leading producer of western melodrama for the popular, if never critically acclaimed, pulp magazine market. Then, in 1930, he had attracted the attention of one of the nation's more sophisticated weeklies, Collier's, and within a year or so he was a full-timer in the slick-paper field, in which good writing actually counted for something. The first Haycox yarns in Collier's were intertwined with those of Kathleen Norris, Erich Maria Remarque, Sax Rohmer (creator of the remarkably evil Dr. Fu Manchu), Damon Runyon, and P.G. Wodehouse. Nine years beyond that first college story, he had made it to the fiction market's A-list.

The Haycox home in Portland's West Hills, a sprawling Georgian Colonial that is now a listed landmark, included a well-furnished basement workshop. The writer, says his son, was a competent carpenter and cultivated massive vegetable gardens, offsetting his sedentary professional life with a vigorous physical regime on weekends.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

Between 1926 and 1932, Haycox did not have great need of reference books or maps, the settings of his stories being in a mostly imaginary West of rolling hills and sage-specked deserts. Towns like Pistol Gap and Sevensticks and Two Dance might be near the Painted Hills or a three days' ride from Laramie, but they were seldom more specifically located. Some of his characters likewise lacked authenticity — men too brave and women too good, although that is precisely what his editors and readers demanded. As a place to make a living while learning the writing trade, he explained to a friend, the pulpers served a purpose. But if you were any good at the business, it was not a permanent address.

He had shelved the Revolutionary War after about a dozen attempts. Those stories were probably the best of his early work, but, while historically and geographically valid, they did not sell well. The best he could do in the early years was to promise himself that when it came to the Great American Novel, if it ever did come to that, it would be authentic. Readers would swat real flies.

Haycox found the transition from serial format to straight novel difficult, here examining his struggle with The Adventurers, his first full attempt at the latter, in 1947.

"It is also a matter of theme ... [and] I suspect that here lies the distinction between serial and novel. Action and plot to a great extent carry the serial along, but for the novel there must be an overriding idea to supply the continuity and the motive power. This I seem to be discovering. As a matter of fact I rather imagine I shall write three or four of these damned things before I get any notion of where sure ground is. Long Storm, you may recall, was a straddle. This new one is farther to the left. As of now it is a failure."

—Letter to W.F.G. Thatcher, February 14, 1947

His reference library, starting with several boxes of books he had acquired in New York City, expanded steadily, typically growing by a hundred or more items annually over the next quarter century. Most of the material came from antiquarian book dealers in the East and was oriented to history and biography and personal recollections. Cowboy tales and accounts of explorations and military campaigns were always of interest, but so too were politics, women's fashions, frontier food, education, the weather, and medical practice. He would never know enough.

Haycox also exploited a resource that was unique to his time — the people who had lived on the frontier and who, having survived its rigors and now in their sixties and seventies and eighties, took pleasure remembering. Some were unreliable witnesses and some fibbed (the tall story was a frontier tradition, of course, so perhaps they did not see it as outright lying), but he found most of his correspondents to be reliable, the best of them more revealing and evocative than any book.

In 1929, during preliminary research for a novel plotted around the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, he discovered eighty-nine-year-old Charles Sharman, a surveyor who had been in the vanguard of that great westward march in the 1860s. The old man was in Arkansas, and Haycox addressed him there, inquiring whether Sharman might offer a few recollections. What came back, in three installments, was a marvelous remembrance of a thousand-mile-long wilderness and a three-year survival course during which Sharman had been starved, shot at, suffered through awful winters, and nearly drowned.⁷

Haycox at Crown Point in the Columbia Gorge, overlooking a partially frozen river. The date of this picture is not known, but it may be associated with the hard winter and deep snows of 1936–1937, when, the author's biographer recalls, the family dog, a hulking St. Bernard, refused to go outside. The eccentric animal also disliked the beach.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

Sharman provided few specifics for the railroad story, Trouble Shooter (1936), he being stuck in isolated grading camps or at end-of-track and Haycox focusing more on action in the lawless, portable town that followed close behind the Union Pacific track gang. Sharman's narrative was an important atmospheric contributor, of course, as would be the recollections of many other one-time soldiers and riders and homesteaders for many other stories. Often as not, they would write to say they had gotten a kick out of some recent magazine piece and found it pretty much on the mark. He would reply, thanking them, then perhaps asking a question or two about the old times.

Over eight months in 1938, one former Seventh Cavalry trooper in Philadelphia responded with nearly a hundred typewritten pages of detail on army life — dress, commands, daily routine — as well as a barracks-eye-view of the battle of the Little Bighorn provided by survivors the old soldier had known.⁸Bugles in the Afternoon (1943) was a particular beneficiary of this intelligence, but so was another cavalry novel, The Border Trumpet (1939), and many short stories.

Haycox and daughter Mary Ann were part of a Portland parade that marked the premiere of Canyon Passage in July 1946. In the crowd, the story circulated that the attractive miss, not separately identified in signage, was the writer's much younger wife. But Sister, as the family called Mary Ann, was simply standing in for Jill, who had firmly declined participation.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

The landscapes of Haycox country often were verified by personal inspection. For one novel in progress, he spent several days tracing the route of a military wagon road that had linked the gold camps of eastern Oregon with the Columbia River at The Dalles. Another time, he scrambled over early land claims and gristmill sites in the Willamette Valley under the guidance of Governor Oswald West, himself a capable historian. In the beginning, of course, the writing budget could not manage significant travel expenses. In a 1937 letter to his wife, Jill, written on a New York–bound train, he reported: "Most of this country [Utah and Wyoming] was the scene of the RR novel and so I spend most of the time checking up on the landscape to see how right I was, or how wrong."⁹

His later writing — the final four novels and most of the two dozen 1946–1949 short stories — was set in early Oregon, and research supporting this work and a half dozen or so novels he had roughly plotted filled dozens of binders and boxes. It was material gleaned from early county records and newspapers and from accounts, many unpublished, of the lives and times of many Oregon settlers. One acquisition was simply a huge pile of letters from some two hundred veterans, describing their adventurers in the Cayuse and Rogue River Indian wars of the late 1840s and early 1950s.¹⁰ The bloody Rogue conflict was to be the backdrop for the next novel when the writer, just turned fifty-one, died after unsuccessful cancer surgery.

In 1939, haycox reached what many would consider the top of the adventure fiction ladder when, within a few weeks, two of his works appeared on the silver screen — the John Ford–directed epic Stagecoach, based on "Stage to Lordsburg" (1937), and Cecil B. DeMille's panoramic Union Pacific, which roughly followed Trouble Shooter. He also appeared before the several million readers of Collier's twenty-plus times — ten short stories, the ten installments of The Border Trumpet, and, in December 1939, the first segments of a new serial novel, Saddle and Ride. It was a year that might have dramatically changed the Haycox lifestyle, for he was also summoned to Los Angeles by Sam Goldwyn and put to work on a cavalry story for Gary Cooper.¹¹ After completing that assignment and one more, however, he demurred as to further work and returned joyfully to Portland. Two months in Hollywood, he told friends, was about as much as a rational human being could take.¹²

Haycox was a small man — 5 feet 8 and 150 pounds — of considerable energy and, perhaps because he spent so much time at a desk, starved for physical activity. His weekends were a blur of handyman projects and vegetable gardening on a grand scale. Fellow writer Robert Ormond Case, one of his closest pals, described him as reserved in manner and difficult to know well but, at the same time, humorous, considerate, and steadfast. He would take time from a crowded schedule to manage Case's successful campaign for a seat on Portland's school board. He refused to join a chorus of notable Portlanders in a public condemnation of Mayor Earl Riley, accused of corruption in 1948, although he acknowledged his friend's probable guilt. Nor would he speak harshly of his own parents for their outrageous negligence — they had dumped him on relatives when they separated.¹³ He was nine or ten at the time and found himself scrambling and sometimes hungry.

The dust jacket of Rim of the Desert (Little, Brown, 1941) featured artist-writer Tom Lea's painting, The Haycox Country. Among the countless illustrations of his work, the writer thought this among the best, suggesting refined characterizations and literary depths that were not generally associated with the western story.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

He was occasionally puzzled by the suggestions of his editors but never offended. His only serious complaints had to do with the illustrations that accompanied his work in magazines and on book jackets, which often were far removed from the story. Illustrators were particularly imprecise as to female characters, he observed, making them appear too modern. The exiled prostitute in "Stage to Lordsburg" was a particular disaster in his mind, resembling some young lady — a secretary, perhaps — waiting for a bus. Alternatively, he praised a moody, modernistic cowboy — a Tom Lea painting, which appeared in Little, Brown promotions and on several Haycox book jackets in the early 1940s. It implied quality and complexity and appealed to a broader audience, he said.

As much as the writer knew about old times and the Old West, there was always one more question — or, as in this example, several — after setting a Little, Brown proofreader straight.

"We'll let the reference stand. Condensed milk was first processed in cans circa 1885 and is therefore accurate enough in point of time for our story [which was The Wild Bunch]. Incidentally, what this country needs is a good reference book dealing in the history and usage of our common, everyday articles. Take the match, the lamp, the field of illumination. It is an all-day chore to search out when the present phosphorus-tipped match came into current usage, how long the sulphur match had vogue before it, when tinder and flint gave way to the sulphur match. Take tobacco. When did the cigar ...."

—Letter to Little, Brown editor Ray Everitt,
January 30, 1941

Haycox chaired a Portland draft board during World War II and was increasingly active in Republican party circles, where some thought him a gubernatorial prospect. His support of Nebraska Governor Dwight Griswold, which included a ghostwritten piece in the Saturday Evening Post lambasting the New Deal, helped Griswold compete for the party's vice presidential nomination in 1944.¹⁴ But when Haycox was asked to consider taking a top Oregon party post in 1946, he knew what the answer had to be. "This public routine finally landed me in a spot where I was suggested as the state republican chairman," he grumped in a letter to Professor Thatcher, "and probably could have swung it. I should have enjoyed it a hell of a lot, and I turned away from it with a bit of regret. I've preached for years that writing is a jealous mistress; now I've got to accept my own philosophy."

Ernest Haycox at Captain Jack's Stronghold in Northern California, circa 1940. Fierce battles and atrocities here during the Modoc War (1872–1873) were reflected in the bestial characterization of Indians in western fiction. But Haycox also portrayed Indians sympathetically. "The stern and slovenly side has been overplayed," he said.

courtesy Ernest Haycox Jr.

Nineteen forty-six was climactic on several fronts. The motion picture based on Canyon Passage, his last serial novel, premiered in Portland at a gala of parties and parades and testimonials that the writer endured with some embarrassment. It also saw the appearance of Long Storm, his first attempt to break the bonds of the serial novel, to write a book that might find modest literary acceptance away from the western story shelf. He would always insist that serial writing was valid, forcing its practitioner to respect compactness and pace and well-knitted plot. The best of it was very good work, indeed, but, he explained, any story structured in installments and governed by length had limitations. Restrictions on the number and complexity of characters were necessary, and events in a serial often took precedence, overwhelming all else. Additionally, whether a writer of western or mystery or modern romance, the serial novelist was bound and gagged by the knowledge that many facets of the human condition could not be represented on the glossy pages of a mass-circulation magazine.

His unrest did not immediately produce "the new Haycox" that he sometimes referred to in jest. It was a four-year struggle, during which an experimental novel and a final attempt at serial writing disappointed him.¹⁵ He was pleased with his last effort, The Earthbreakers, suspecting that he had finally achieved significant reality in his characters; and save a few changes — nothing terribly important — it was finished when he died.

There were a number of casualties during the final four years, mostly writing projects set aside for lack of time. One of these was an unusual anthology which, linked by the narrative of its knowledgeable editor, was to present a history of the western frontier as imparted by the best of its fiction.¹⁶ That fantasy could be employed in this fashion, to produce an essentially truthful account, may be an arresting concept to some. For Erny Haycox, however, it was an entirely plausible thing. He had discovered in New York that fact and fiction could be the best of companions. In fact, putting the pair together, give or take a little, is not a bad description of what he did at the office for two score years.

Notes

The letters and documents cited are primarily from the writer's correspondence and research files, maintained by his son. Also important to this article, as well as to the Haycox biography, was material collected by Richard Etulain while a graduate student at the University of Oregon in the early 1960s, the Crowell-Collier correspondence files at the New York Public Library, and documents at the University of Oregon library's Haycox collection.

^1.�Stephen L. Tanner, Ernest Haycox (New York: Twayne; London: Prentice Hall, 1996).

^2.�The writer's soon-depleted savings came from a six-month job as a police reporter on the Portland Oregonian. The war chest had withered to $43.48 in late May; providentially, he sold three stories for $270 in June.

^3.�From a speech draft, probably written in late 1949, on the subject of brotherhood.

^4.�From a Haycox letter to close friend Arthur (Ole) Larson in Portland, January 5, 1926.

^5.�The writer maintained a "cash book" in New York, in which receipts and expenditures were carefully recorded. This would in time become a log of all stories written and all sales, the original notebook remaining the basic record of progress for the rest of his life.

^6.�This is from the first of a series of Haycox letters that Professor Thatcher preserved and reproduced, unfortunately without dates. However, the writer mentions his age, thirty-three, so it was written in 1932 or 1933.

^7.�Edited for publication, Charles Sharman's recollections appeared as A Very Special Party in the spring 2001 issue of the Montana Historical Society's magazine, Montana, the Magazine of Western History.

^8.�This informant was John M. Kenney, who joined the Seventh Cavalry in March 1879, thirty-three months after the battle of Little Bighorn. General George Armstrong Custer and nearly half of the six-hundred-man regiment were killed in that action.

^9.�The letter was written on Friday, February 26, 1937. One of the railroad items in his library is an 1871 pictorial guidebook of the UPRR "from Omaha to Ogden." So, though not yet seen by the writer, the scenery in Trouble Shooter, his UP story, was just fine.

^10.�These had been solicited in 1896–1897 by T.A. Wood of Portland, who was then grand commander of the Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast and was seeking a federal pension for the old soldiers.

^11.�This was Seventh Cavalry, which had been through several hands before reaching Haycox. Goldwyn is said to have liked his version but did not produce it, and it is uncertain whether it ever saw the light of day.

^12.�Ernest Haycox Jr., On a Silver Desert (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), reproduces a long 1939 letter in which the writer, while respectful of Hollywood in various specific examples, found its posturing, procrastination, and general bedlam wearisome.

^13.�The only two people he publicly chastised from time to time were FDR, whom he considered an aspiring despot, and then-Republican Senator Wayne Morse, whom Haycox found disagreeably ambitious and egotistical.

^14.�The Post article, "The Nebraska Story" (September 4, 1943), helped make the governor something of a force at the 1944 Republican convention. He lost the vice presidential contest to Governor John Bricker of Ohio but had his moment later, introducing "the next president of the United States." Remember Tom Dewey?

^15.�He decided against releasing the experimental novel, The Adventurers, and it was not published until 1954. Condensed, the serial work, Head of the Mountain, first appeared in Esquire magazine in 1950–1951.

^16.�While this project would have required "a solid year of reading," he already knew many of its contributors. Hamlin Garland, Bret Harte, Charles M. Russell, William McLeod Raine, Edwin L. Sabin, and Owen Wister were mentioned in a 1946 letter to Professor Thatcher.

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